That Night in May
by The Mad Writer of Brooklyn
Summary: Even Mad Scientists and Clowns of dubious alignment have people they love very much. And for Henry it had always been Lily. When Lily dies, Henry does the unthinkable and builds a time machine. But his design is flawed, and he ends up in many sticky situations. It's up to the Doctor and Rose to save him. Trigger warning for bad stuff in general. Rose/10th Doctor if you squint.


**A/N: This fic is based off of yours truly haphazardly combining Ludo's Broken Bride Rock Opera and Season 2 of Doctor Who. I am but a humble writer with a wandering imagination and too much time on her hands. I do not own Doctor Who or the Storyline from Broken Bride, but I did come up with some names and characterization so I own those? Yes? No? Maybe? Probably not. Ok, I'll stop talking. On with the show!**

**That Night in May**

**A Doctor Who Fic by The Mad Writer of Brooklyn**

**1. Clowns of Dubious Alignment**

Even Mad Scientists and Clowns of dubious alignment have people they love very much. And for Henry it had always been Lily. Lily had never been a real beauty, but Henry had next been handsome either, and they went through life being mildly attractive as a team. It was always Henry and Lily against the world, no matter what, that was, until an awful night in May.

But Henry wouldn't give up. Death was just an obstacle. One a physicist could figure out how to overcome. The world was just a series of overlapping, vibrating strings, and Henry had made himself believe that somehow, Lily was just vibrating at a different frequency, and somehow, he would have to match hers. Yet try as he like, Henry couldn't make it work. He'd almost lost hope, in fact, until a very strange evening about two years after Lily's death.

The bathroom floor had been floral tiles.

Henry Engelhardt had never noticed it before, they were pretty pink flowers on the tiles around the toilet. He'd never handed to be this close to the toilet, but as his lunch came back up the wrong end, Henry wondered at the inevitability.

He'd been having a particularly unpleasant day, and Henry felt like he'd reached the end of the line.

After he was sure he was done bringing up his lunch, Henry stood up to open the cabinet, and pulled out two very thin, very sharp razors. He flushed the toilet, and put down the cover. Henry sat down, unbuttoning the cuff of his sleeve, he aimed to slit his wrists and be done with.

"Remember daddy, up the river and not across the stream," a little girl's voice said.

Henry's head shot up, and in the doorway stood a little girl, with the girth of a ten year old, who had brown curls, dressed in a blue dress and had no face.

"Jesus fucking Christ!" Henry started so hard he knocked himself off the toilet and onto the floor. "Who are you?"

"I'm your daughter, daddy. Don't be silly." A little giggle came from nowhere.

"I'm sorry to tell you, but I have no daughter." Henry said shakily.

"Aw, daddy, that isn't funny." A man's voice said with a distinct Southern American accent.

Henry gripped the side of the tub hard, his eyes shooting around, "Who said that? Who is it? I have a knife!"

"Henry, Henry," into the frame, behind the little girl came a large clown, more than six feet tall, dressed in trousers of black and yellow stripes, a white shirt with frills and topped off with the makeup one associated with clowns on average.

"Whoever you are, get out!" Henry shouted.

"Oh Henry, we can't leave."

"Why? Leave! Whatever you are! Just go!"

"We are you Henry." The clown kneeled down before him, "Don't you remember me?"

Henry blinked at the clown, suddenly, he was transported to a time in his childhood when a clown with a Southern American accent had terrorized him under the guise of "entertainment" on his sixth birthday.

"You," Henry said, angrily.

The clown smiled, "Now you remember me. I knew I wasn't all that forgettable."

Henry turned his gaze from the clown to the little girl with no face. "And you? Who are you?"

The girl tilted her head in a very familiar way to Henry, "Daddy, you're playing make-believe right?"

Henry shook his head. "I'm your daughter!" The little girl cried, "Your and Lily's daughter!"

Henry looked at the child, squinting hard, her hair was like Lily's, and the way she tilted her head was similar to how Henry did when he was thinking. There had been a few babies, years ago, but Lily had never been carry a child to term, so they'd given up. "What's happened? Ha-Have I gone completely mad?" he looked back to the clown, "Have I?"

"Maybe, or maybe you're just manifesting your subconscious in a personified manner to reach the crevices of your mind previously unattainable."

Henry blinked, the words coming from the clown's mouth sounded less like some low-grade entertainer and more like something Henry would say. "So, you two are…my subconscious?"

"Why not?"

Just then, a group of blue jays flew into the bathroom, the smallest of which landed on Henry's shoulder.

Henry looked at the bird, which was whistling prettily and tickling the side of his neck with its feathers. "Is this part of my subconscious too?"

"Why not?" the clown said again.

"Okay," Henry nodded, "if you are my subconscious, what do you want?"

"It was such a shame how Lily died, and now you, her husband, are trying ridiculous feats of science in an attempt to bring her back." The clown stated hollowly.

Henry laughed, "I don't have to justify myself to you." Henry raised his chin, trying to look as tough and intimidating as one could sprawled on the floor between a toilet and a bathtub.

"I'm not askin' you to justify yourself. All I'm sayin' is, maybe you should look at something a little more obvious for what you're trying to do."

"What? Like, oh, time travel?"

"Why not?"

Henry stared at him, "Look, I might be completely bonkers, but time travel is pushing it."

"Is it though? You want to bend reality to bring back your old ball and chain-"

"Shut up! How dare you?!" Henry started to get to his feet.

"Whoa there, big boy, calm your shit, I meant _wife_, if you're going to bend reality, you might do it the more logical way."

"And what way is that?" Henry asked skeptically.

"I think you already know, Henry." The clown handed him a little watch.

And with it in his hand is how Henry woke on the bathroom floor four hours later.

Henry had a makeshift lab in the basement. It was nothing so impressive as the basement labs seen on TV but it sufficed to do the job needed. Henry looked at the parts to his many times built and rebuilt machine meant to vibrate him into another universe. What if different times merely vibrated differently as well. The theory was small, but many a great scientist had gone on less to prove a point. He started to pull apart and put back together the different pieces of the machine until he created something that they thought might work. He tried it. It didn't work. On his board Henry wrote down a few things then went back to work.

And this was a process he would repeat for another thirteen years.

Finally, one murky, unpleasantly wet day in December of 2007, something quite different happened when Henry switched on the machine. He took a tentative seat on the chair he'd made to support his journey, strapped himself in and the button to activate it. Everything so far had gone smoothly, as it so rarely did, it gave him a boost of confidence to go forward. With a hard push, Henry forced the rusty lever forward, setting the co-ordinates for Devonshire, 12th of May, 1992, which was more than enough time to save Lily. The machine made a loud creaky sound, and the reality around Henry began to fall away.

Henry gleefully yelled, "It's working! It's working!" But soon things went wrong. Reality didn't stop changing around him. Days and nights swept past him at abnormal speeds and the clock before him broke. The basement was much changed, he could hardly remember it. Then there was no basement at all. He desperately tried to turn it off but the lever was jammed so tight it was beyond his meager strength. As he pulled with all his might, his surroundings grew more and more primitive, and the field around the machine would not let him escape.

Finally, after a herculean struggle against the lever, it finally dislodged and Henry was thrown from his machine.

He landed a few feet away from the machine, hitting the soft ground with a heavy thud. The environment was familiar enough that he knew where he was, but they weren't surroundings you wanted to equate yourself with any day of the week. Giant trees soared above him into the yellowish sky and huge rocks and bushes were scattered about the dry terrain. Henry was struggling to his feet when he heard it. An all consuming shriek from overhead that was like no shriek he'd ever heard. Looking up, he saw the source: a giant bird was circling among the sickly looking clouds. The little girl with no face was tugging at his jacket, "Daddy, what is that?" Henry adjusted his glasses, swallowing hard, "That's a pterodactyl." He said, almost calmly. Then panic seized him, "THAT'S A PTERODACTYL!" he screamed, running.

For the first few minutes, Henry ran with no direction, until he heard the thing crashing somewhere east of him. He turned left, seeing an opening a few feet up the side of a cliff. Henry ran as fast as he could, trying to avoid being eaten by a giant flying monster too close for comfort.


End file.
